What’s the biggest difference between people who are successful in social media and those who are not? Simple – the successful people have built themselves an audience.

An audience doesn’t necessarily mean having 10,000 followers here or 5,000 friends there. At its most basic level it might be that. But what’s a bunch of friends and followers if they aren’t helping you to grow your business?

Consider this: what if your “audience” isn’t anyone who would be interested in what it is you offer? What if they were people just looking to boost their numbers without any interest in engaging with you in any sort of dialogue? What if they were primarily focused on promoting their own stuff the majority of the time? These types of scenarios are clearly not ideal.

So what should you really be looking to achieve? Building the right kind of audience with social media means your participation there is leading you to be seen as a credible, trust-worthy source who may be able to help others solve whatever problem they may be having. It means you are reaching a market of people you have deliberately sought out through search strategies who might need what you have.

When you’ve grabbed the attention of your followers and friends and built interest and credibility, you now have a way to gain traffic to your website, capture more leads and continue building and strengthening the relationship.

It’s all in the three C’s:

Content

Content is the lifeblood of successful social media marketers. What reasons are you giving people to listen to you? This goes two ways: sharing your own helpful posts, links, tips and resources-and promoting and sharing the content of others. This does three main things: establishes your expertise, drives traffic to your site, and provides your audience with helpful information. Remember, the content you are sharing should not always be your own.

Conversation

Simply by being seen as someone who provides great content in the social media space you will naturally find yourself engaged in conversation. Having these one on one conversations is what is going to make you stand out among the noise and deepen the relationship. In addition, when you make it a habit to promote others, this brings more “social appreciation” your way. These interactions cause others to seek out more information about you beyond where you’ve made the initial connection.

Conversion

Once you have converted someone to a newsletter subscriber, blog subscriber or paying client or customer, you’ve taken the steps toward acquiring another raving fan. These loyal folks will not only bring you more sales, but will be much more likely to sing your praises to others out in the social media universe. This is how you grow your “tribe.”

Do you see how simple and effective it is to build an audience of captivated friends and followers? Do you see the difference this could make in your bottom line?

Let me know your thoughts on this.  Anything else you would like to add?  Also, if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for my free social media simplified e-course.

A quick video for you explaining why you want to personalize the friend requests you make on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

My cat Tigerlily decided she wanted to co-star by being naughty and jumping up on the dining room table behind me! Bad Tiger!

Business owners are accustomed to tracking their results when it comes to marketing, whether online or off. There are certain methods for calculating your return on investment which are in most cases pretty straightforward.

Along comes social media marketing and suddenly measuring your ROI isn’t so cut and dry. I am often asked how you can tell whether the time you’ve spent on social media activities is really making a difference. Here are some easy–as well as free–ways to help determine whether your social media efforts are sizzling…or fizzling.

Profile engagement: Are people in your target market replying to you on Twitter,  inviting you to join groups on LinkedIn, commenting on your Facebook wall, and so on?

Followers and friends: I often emphasize the fact that quantity doesn’t always equal quality–but it is one indication of whether you’re being seen, heard and offering something of value.

Blog subscribers: If readers like what they see and want to be notified of each time you post, you can be sure you’ve struck a chord with them–as well as increased the possibility that they will respond well to offers you make in the future.

Newsletter subscribers: If the visitors being driven to your site by social media are being converted into e-zine subscribers, you know that you have appealed to them enough to further the relationship with you. The fact that you have their permission to communicate with them regularly will only strengthen the know, like and trust factor.

Links from other blogs: Is your site being linked to by other relevant blogs? This can indicate that you are providing valuable content as well as posting consistently.

Website metrics: Google Analytics is a free tool that makes it easy to see your page views per visitor, time spent on the site, unique visitors, frequency of visits, conversions and more.

Blog comments: Comments will tell you not only that your content is interesting, fresh and worthy of reading–but that readers are willing to stick around and take the time to engage you.

Social bookmarking/social news: Are your blog posts being voted up or bookmarked on sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg?

Products/services sold: This is the ultimate goal, obviously. All of the indicators above help give you a clearer picture of how likely it is that this goal will be reached.

So, it boils down to:  Are you being seen as an expert? Are you findable? Do people want to find out more about what it is you do?

You may not be able to equate your interactions to dollars right away, but you are planting seeds which can pay off in a big way later on.  In my eyes, that makes social media well worth most small business owners’ time.

How do you measure the impact of your social media activities?  Do you have a system for for tracking your results?

Photo credit: kevinzhengli

Someone asked this question the other day on a forum I was browsing and I’ve been pondering it since.

I don’t have anything profound to say about it, but I will share that between my computer and iPhone I do spend a heck of a lot of time on social sites.

The majority of that time is spent networking and interacting for the purposes of growing business relationships—because I do happen to have a business online.  I also have the handy excuse that social media is a major component of the work I do with clients.

Social media can be addictive and time-consuming and is something done generally in isolation. But the interesting thing about this particular discussion is that the original poster was referring to being less social within social networks—as opposed to out in the “real world.”

Essentially they were saying that a great majority of time is spent on your updates, comments, recommendations, etc. leaving less time to interact with others, answer questions and engage in back and forth conversation.

I myself may have experienced this a bit in the beginning, when I was still getting acclimated to how the sites actually worked.  But now the most value—and fun—comes out of the actual “socializing” and relationships.

It’s also worth mentioning that social media has facilitated many in-person meetings such as “tweetups” and local groups formed through meetup.com and the like.

So I’m curious: Either way, do you feel your use of sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. has caused you to be less social?  Do you give yourself a break from it once in a while?  Do you obsessively check Twitter 25,000 times a day like I do?   Let me know your thoughts.

Also, if you are interested in learning how to use online marketing and social media techniques to help build your business and give you a competitive edge, check out my affordable e-Coaching program that’s built around your schedule.

Photo credit: Intersection Consulting